30-Year Mortgage Rate Falls Back to 3.54%

By Michael Aneiro

With Treasury rates broadly falling in the past week, the 30-year fixed-rate mortgage rate dropped to 3.54% in the week ended today, according to Freddie Mac‘s (FMCC) latest Primary Mortgage Market Survey, from 3.63% a week ago. With the exception of last week’s jump, the rate has held within in a tight range between 3.51% and 3.54% ever since late January. A year ago the same rate averaged 4.08%.

The 15-year fixed-rate mortgage rate also fell slightly to 2.72%, down from 2.79% a week earlier and 3.30% a year ago.

Amey Stone is Barron’s Income Investing blogger and Current Yield columnist. She was formerly a managing editor at CBS MoneyWatch, MSN Money and AOL DailyFinance. Her responsibilities included overseeing market coverage and personal finance topics. Prior to those roles, she was a senior writer at BusinessWeek where she authored the Street Wise column online and contributed to the magazine’s Inside Wall Street column. Topics covered included economics, corporate finance, Fed policy, municipal bonds, mutual funds and dividend investing. She co-authored King of Capital, a biography of Citigroup Chairman Sandy Weill. She is a graduate of Yale University and Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism.